Civil Structural Health Monitoring Using FBG Sensors: Trends and Challenges

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is a promising and challenging field of research of the 21st century. Civil structures are the most precious economic assets of any country, proper monitoring of these are necessary to prevent any hazardous situation and ensuring safety. FiberBragg Grating (FBG) sensors have emerged as a reliable, in situ, nondestructive device for monitoring, diagnostics and control in civil structures. FBG sensors offer several key advantages over other technologies in the structural sensing field. In this article, recent research and development activities in SHM using FBG sensors have been presented. Some of the strain-temperature discrimination techniques recently proposed by us have also been discussed. Distributed strain sensing in a concrete bridge(field trial) using FBG sensors has been presented